


the dirt in which our roots may grow

by sometimesweareturtles



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Break Up, Cryptid Hunter Keith (Voltron), Flowers, Gender-Neutral Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Getting Back Together, Hanahaki Disease, Keith & Pidge | Katie Holt Friendship, M/M, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, Pining Keith (Voltron), Post-Break Up, Protective Lance (Voltron), Vomiting, i love myself some platonic kidge, they are a brotp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:48:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22017385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sometimesweareturtles/pseuds/sometimesweareturtles
Summary: Keith had said he was fine.He’d sat down on the couch with Lance, had put his hands in his pockets, had smiled blankly as Lance told him that it wasn’t his fault, that it was Lance, that he wasn’t happy, that he didn’t like Keith in that way anymore, that it was fun while it lasted. Keith had smiled so hard it felt like his face was permanently etched in stone, pretended his eyes weren’t watering, let Lance give him back whatever had accumulated at his apartment over the past four months, and walked out on shaky legs.Keith had said he was fine.And then the flowers had started growing.
Relationships: Keith & Pidge | Katie Holt, Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Comments: 37
Kudos: 346
Collections: Just some pretty nice fics





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from “North” - Sleeping at Last
> 
> Warning for vomiting and blood, because this is Hanahaki. I put graphic descriptions of violence just in case - I don't know if it actually warrants that, but just in case. :) <3

Keith had said he was fine. 

He’d sat down on the couch with Lance, had put his hands in his pockets, had smiled blankly as Lance told him that it wasn’t his fault, that it was Lance, that he wasn’t happy, that he didn’t like Keith in that way anymore, that it was fun while it lasted. Keith had smiled so hard it felt like his face was permanently etched in stone, pretended his eyes weren’t watering, let Lance give him back whatever had accumulated at his apartment over the past four months, and walked out on shaky legs. 

Keith was a liar. 

It was not fine; it was so, _so_ not fine. But what was he supposed to do? He couldn’t just demand that Lance not break up with him; it wasn’t a relationship unless both parties were invested. And there was no way he’d be able to ask Lance what Keith did wrong, what made him change his mind, what caused him to want out of what had seemed like a great arrangement. So he’d just… let himself get pushed out the door. Walked unsteadily to his car, sat down in the driver’s seat, and stared blankly as he wondered what had just happened. 

It had been going great! Or, at least, Keith had thought so. He’d been happy - so goddamn happy. How could he not be? Lance was… Lance. He was loud and excitable and affectionate, had the stupidest sounding laugh but somehow managed to land in the best jokes when he wasn’t even trying, somehow exuded safety and got Keith to open up. He was Keith’s best friend since high school, crush since freshman year of college (let’s just say that being roommates had been a mistake - close quarters, cuddles, and Lance being... generally shameless - not that he had anything to be ashamed about - was not a good mix for Ketih’s mental health), boyfriend since four months ago. Keith had been freaking ecstatic when Lance had asked him out right after finals last year; Pidge still had the texts and voicemails he had spammed them with, citing that they were saving them for the wedding but Keith really knew that it was for blackmail. Of course, those were probably useless now.

Keith picked up his phone, turning it on, still sitting in Lance’s parking lot because there was no way he was going to be able to drive right now. It would be like ripping off the window wipers of his car and expecting to be able to drive through a thunderstorm. A suicide mission, basically. 

“Pidge?” he said into the receiver, and they must have picked up on the complete misery in his voice because they didn’t make fun of the way his nose was overflowing and his throat felt slimy with flem. 

“Keith?” they asked. “Where are you?”

“Can you come get me?” Keith asked, hiccuping slightly (it always happened whenever he had to cry, much to his chagrin). 

“I’m getting into my car now,” they promised. “Tell me where you are. I’m worried.”

“I’m, uh, I’m in Lance’s parking lot.”

A pause.

“Did you guys have a fight?” Pidge asked. Keith could hear the sound of a door opening and closing, small feet pounding down the stairs (though everything about Pidge was small, so it wasn’t really a fair comparison), their car starting and their blinker going off as they pulled out of the parking lot.

“No,” Keith said. He sniffled, reaching up to rub some snot from his face with his shirt sleeve.

“Did something happen to him?!” Pidge demanded.

Keith tried to chuckle but it just sounded watery, like when old people drank water down into their lungs and then coughed it back up. “No,” he croaked. “I would have called 911 first.”

“Do you want to tell me?” Pidge asked, softer now. Keith had been friends with them for a long time, and they could likely tell when he was upset. 

Keith shook his head, whimpering a little into his sleeve. “When you get here,” he promised. 

“Okay,” Pidge agreed smoothly. “I’m like five minutes away. Hold on, okay? And then I’ll bring you to Coldstone and you can sit in the car while I go get you that ice cream you like, alright? Brownie pieces and cookie dough in cake batter. And we can watch that mothman documentary. Hang on.” Which just made Keith want to cry more, because it was such a Lance thing to say. And such a Lance thing to do.

Which was the worst part. Keith had always been too scared to ask Lance out because he was worried about messing up their group dynamic, but when Lance had asked him first he hadn’t even thought about whether or not they’d break up. He’d been too elated, too distracted by all of Lance’s shininess, about the fancy new relationship he had just entered. And Keith had never even thought of a possibility in which he’d want to break up with Lance, and since Lance had asked him out, had never entertained the possibility of Lance wanting to break it off himself. Sure, he had been expecting fights, and he knew that relationships could get messy, but he and Lance had already been such good friends before hand that he’d assumed that the two of them would simply act the same, just with more hand holding and kisses and cuddles at night. 

Which made Keith the one at fault here. What person didn’t think about whether their boyfriend was going to break up with them? What signs had he missed, what talks had Lance tried to insinuate to save their relationship that Keith had somehow brushed off or ignored? Was it because he’d refused to watch the old, old version of Legally Blond with him two nights before? Was it because Lance didn’t like how clingy and physically needy Keith could sometimes get at night, when they were sleeping in the same bed and he became an octopus of a person, wrapping every arm and limb around the other boy? Keith needed answers. Not that he was going to ask for any, probably, since that would make him look needy and sad and like a liar, since he’d told Lance that he was perfectly fine with them breaking off and yes, they would still be friends, and no, there would be no hard feelings between the two of them. 

Keith must have zoned out, because in no time at all Pidge was there, knocking a small freckled fist on Keith’s window. “Open up!” they mouthed through the glass, and so Keith reached for the door, clicking open the lock.

Pidge immediately opened it, grabbing his arm and tugging on it. “Come on out,” they said, sighing. Keith threw himself out of the car, collapsing on top of them. They had grown over the years, going from a gangly little teenager to a… okay, admittedly not-so-mature 5’3” gremlin, and Keith and Lance liked to make fun of their height, seven inches below Keith’s 5’10” and nine and a half below Lance’s 6’.5” (the .5 was very important, or so Lance liked to claim). Now they could fully support his weight, even when he leaned completely on them. 

“My car’s right here, stupid,” they told him. “Don’t fall down on me now.”

“Be nice,” Keith mumbled into their ear. “I’m going through a breakup.”

Pidge froze. “A what?”

Keith pressed his face closer to their hair and neck. “Lance broke up with me,” he murmured, sighing. He wondered if they could feel the stickiness on his cheeks from the tears that had streamed down his face unbidden.

“I’m sorry,” Pidge said, “I don’t mean to be insensitive, but Lance broke up with you? I - I really can’t see that happening. Are you sure it wasn’t -”

“Nope,” Keith said gloomily, straightening but keeping his arms thrown over their shoulders. “We’re done, apparently.”

“Jeez,” Pidge let out a breath. “Shit, Keith, I’m really sorry.”

He laughed, unhumorous. “It’s fine.”

Pidge led him over to their car, opening the passenger seat door and depositing him gently down into his seat. When he remained unmoving, staring down at his hands in his lap, they sighed and leaned over him to buckle the seatbelt as though he was still five. It was kind of funny, if Keith could even fathom the idea of laughing, that Pidge, who could barely keep theirself alive, was taking care of him as though they were the Mom friend and not Hunk. 

“Let’s go get your ice cream,” Pidge said once they were both settled. “I locked your car and put the keys in my computer bag. Do you need anything else?”

He shook his head, and they sighed, pulling out of the parking lot. “Right. I’ll get you the 12 oz one. And maybe a pint.” He could see them glancing dubiously out of the corner of their eye, and squeezed his eyes shut, leaning against the window and smushing his cheek into the cold glass. 

“Hey, Keith,” Pidge said, so softly he could barely hear them over the loud clunking of their fifteen year old car (it used to belong to Matt, until he got a better one, and sold it to their for probably too little, but it wasn’t worth much anyway and Pidge and Hunk had fixed it up). “Are you alright? For real? I’m sorry - I don’t have much experience with… comforting people.”

“I’ll be fine,” Keith rasped. “I just need to… drown my feelings in ice cream and mothman documentaries first.”

Pidge didn’t sound convinced, but they made a small noise of agreement. “Do you have your lactaid pills or do you need me to get some?”

“I’ll be fine without them,” Keith said, finally sitting up and crossing his arms over his chest like a petulant teenager. 

Pidge snorted. “Keith, I took you out for ice cream two year ago and you spent the rest of the night throwing up. Take your damn pills.”

“They make everything taste bad though,” Keith grumbled. “And I want my ice cream.”

“Wash your mouth out with soap after,” Pidge said. “I don’t care. You’ll thank me later.”

“Whatever,” Keith said. But he took the pill that they handed to him and swallowed it dry. 

“Not yet!” Pidge yelped. “I haven’t even gotten the ice cream yet.”

“That way the taste will be gone,” Keith said. “And we’re here anyway.” He pointed; Coldstone Creamery had appeared a few buildings over, industrial with one of the light bulbs burned out so that it cast an eerie shadow on the rest of the sign. 

“Wait here,” Pidge said, getting out the car and tossing the keys onto the armrest, heading into the building after slamming the driver’s seat door. He saw them head up to the counter, the worker inside getting the ice cream and smashing up the ingredients inside, putting it into a huge cup. Coldstone servings were really excessively big, not that Keith was complaining. He saw Pidge also get a smaller cup of what looked like vanilla something else (if he had to guess it was probably Reece’s and peanut butter) before paying and heading back out.

“Here’s your ice cream, heathen,” they said, holding it out. Keith took it eagerly, taking the spoon out from where the employee had stabbed it and licking it eagerly. “I can’t believe you eat that. You have a crazy sweet tooth.”

Keith grinned at them, ice cream smeared in his teeth. They made a gagging sound, turning away. “Gross. Keep it in your mouth.”

God, that was such a Lance thing to say. It was obvious that the three of them, Keith, Pidge, Lance (and Hunk, but he came along a year after they had first met because he’d been in another school that had closed down) had been friends for years. Which made Keith’s stomach churn, because Lance and he were “still friends,” apparently. Which meant there was no excuse to miss out on the big dinners that they three of them always had on Mondays, and it meant that Keith still had to go to Hunk’s house this Thursday and hang out with them and pretend that he was fine and that he wasn’t grieving and going through a Lance withdrawal. Because he and Lance would text constantly, FaceTime every night if they didn’t stay over at each other’s apartments, call each other during their lunch breaks. 

Keith probably wasn’t ever going to see him again. 

Or, he would, but only when Hunk or Pidge were there. And it would be stilted, awkward, like when they first met and Lance was convinced that Keith was aloof and stuck up and wanted nothing to do with him (which was just - so wrong. Keith wanted _everything_ to do with Lance). And Keith would just have to stick to being sad and lonely and an outsider.

Neither of them said anything as Keith followed Pidge up the stairs to their apartment, still spooning large mouthfuls of ice cream into his mouth as they opened their door and led the way inside. 

Pidge disappeared into their room, and Keith could hear the thud of something hitting their floor (hopefully their neighbors downstairs weren’t home). He walked over to the couch, plopping down and leaned back, staring up at his ceiling. He placed his ice cream on the table next to the armrest, groaned and buried his face in his hands. 

He could hear Pidge moving around, and then the door to their room opening and their footsteps on the carpet as they came over to Keith.

“Hey,” they said, “you good?”

“Fine,” Keith mumbled.

They sighed. “C’mere,” they said, adding, “I don’t do this for just anyone, so you better feel special, Kogane,” and then wrapped him up in their arms, letting him fall back to sprawl across the couch in his boots. 

Pidge was small but still solid, a good wall for Keith to bury his face into, a soft old t-shirt for him to soak with his tears. “It’ll be okay,” they murmured, rubbing his back in small circles and cradling him in his arms.

And so Keith cried and cried and cried and his ice cream half-melted on the side table and Pidge sat there, legs probably going numb, just holding him.

-

The next day, Keith felt oddly slimy. His cheeks were sticky and he raised himself from the couch, body protesting, slightly lightheaded. He walked into the kitchen, snatching a dirty mug from the sink and pouring tap water into it before chugging it down. 

The clock on the counter said that it was 10:56 am, which meant Pidge was at their job because it was a Thursday. Keith was so lucky that he didn’t need to go in today; his coworkers loved asking about Lance, and he really didn’t want to deal with that at all. 

Instead, he took a shower to try and wash away some of the sliminess, and collapsed back on the couch, this time with a soft blanket he stole from his bed. Using Pidge’s Netflix, he pulled up his favorite cryptid documentary and sighed, curling up into a little ball underneath the heavy fabric. 

As the narrator droned on and on about the creepy sightings of dark humanoid figures and creatures swooping in and attacking people, Keith rolled over onto his back, closing his eyes.

He didn’t know whether he should contact Lance or not. He’d never really dated anyone besides Lance seriously, and wasn’t sure of the correct etiquette to call your ex who had also just dumped you but said that you were still friends. Maybe he should just text him? 

But Keith wasn’t really sure what he would say, anyway. “Why did you leave me? What made me not good enough for you?” That just sounded sad and desperate and Keith didn’t want Lance to know that he wasn’t fine, because that would be going back on what he’d already said and he liked to keep his word. He was fine, and he would keep that promise, and he would support whatever Lance decided to do, whether it be jump into another relationship or come back to Keith.

In the end, it was decided for him. An hour into the first season of the Office, Keith got a phone call from Lance himself.

“Hey, man,” was the first thing Lance said to him, and Keith had to stop himself from swooning or fainting because of the rush of blood from his brain to his face. 

“Hi,” Keith croaked. He coughed, clearing his throat, and then repeated, “Hi, Lance.”

“You okay?” Lance asked. “You sound sick.”

Keith laughed nervously. “Yeah. I lost my voice, uh, yesterday. Got a cough.”

“Right,” Lance said doubtfully. “Sure. Um, anyway, I just wanted to make sure you were okay? Your car is still here. I thought you might have been kidnapped, or something. I was a little worried.”

Keith felt kind of like crying right then and there. Their friendship in the past few years had always been cheerful, happy, open. Keith was getting freaking whiplash from how fast their dynamic had changed, how it had gone from sweet and affectionate and soft to _this_ , jagged and sharp, like he’d taken a fist to a mirror and then walked all over the shards with no shoes. 

“No, yeah, it’s fine,” Keith mumbled, “I called Pidge and… got them to pick me up.” 

An awkward pause, only broken up by their breathing. 

“Well,” Lance said, “good talk.”

Keith straight up snorted, like a pig, and then rushed to spit out, “Hey, wait! Um…”

“Yeah?” Lance asked.

“You wanna go hang out or something? I haven’t eaten yet today,” Keith blurted, and then immediately wanted to facepalm and dig himself a hole to bury himself into. Oh, God. What was he thinking? Lance had just broken up with him, probably because he didn’t want to hang out with him anymore, especially not one on one at some diner or fast food place. “Just as friends,” he said quickly, trying to clarify and not scare Lance off, but he doubted he was succeeding. 

He held his breath as Lance said nothing, fidgeting under his blanket, picking at the skin peeling off of his fingers. 

“Sure,” Lance said. “Want me to drive my car over, and then you can pick up your’s after? I’ll drive you back to my place.”

“Okay,” Keith said, relieved. He was going to hang out with Lance! Maybe now he could get some answers, or at least get an idea on this new, awkward situation he’d thrown himself into. It couldn’t go too badly, right? The worst case scenario would be that Lance wouldn’t want to hang out with him ever again and tell Keith that he hated him. Which, admittedly would be… It would be really freaking terrible, but Keith also should have known that this was a possibility when he’d first agreed to go out with Lance. Now he was just facing the consequences of his actions, and he shouldn’t act like a surprised pikachu (one of Lance’s favorite memes) when it wasn’t going how he wanted. “You wanna go to… Dolton’s?”

“Yeah, sounds good,” Lance said absentmindedly. “I’ll be there in like twenty minutes. See you.”

“See you,” Keith said softly, grinning down at his lap. 

Lance’s car was blue (of course) and older, one of the models from before automatic driving had gotten popular. He got it for a really cheap price a couple of years before since no one else wanted a manual, and had almost crashed it probably fifteen times. It was dented and dirty on the inside, and the trunk was stained by some mysterious green liquid from its previous owner, but Lance refused to get rid of it no matter how unsafe it was or how many times Hunk, Pidge and Keith had tried to find him a better one. He called her Blue and stated that she was his lady and that he would never pass her up for a better car until she could no longer work, which Keith feared would be sooner and sooner each day because Blue’s engine sounded like someone hacking up their lungs along with their stomach.

The car was tense and silent as Keith got in. Lance didn’t have the radio on, for some reason, and the air conditioning was off as well, though that wasn’t surprising considering Blue would probably kneel over and die if she had to do anything more than driving. 

They arrived at Dolton’s in a little under six minutes, and Keith spent the entire car ride staring blankly at the clock and sneaking little peaks of Lance’s profile. His face was set, jaw tense, and he looked angry, his eyes focused on the road. 

Dolton’s was a little hole in the wall of a restaurant, discovered by Hunk (of course), that served really good, thick crust pizza. Keith was always more of a thin crust guy, but for Lance he was willing to eat the extra bread. Thick crust had grown on him (just like Lance had). Lance went up to the counter and ordered for both of them, as usual, and Keith headed into the back of the little restaurant to find them a table.

The floors and the walls of Dolton’s were covered in rusty-red tiles, with cream wallpaper after waist height. The lighting was poor and yellow, making the whole scene seem a little old and broken down, but Dalton’s had the best pizza in all of Arus, as long as you ordered the right thing (Their Hawaiian and pepperoni was somehow amazing, but don’t you dare order cheese or vegetable because they somehow managed to mess that up every time). Keith chose a booth in the back corner, under a half burned out light, and signed, sitting down and leaning on his hand. He turned to watch Lance, who was grinning and talking to the man at the counter, who just looked tired and bored and not too happy to be there. Lance put both hands down on the counter and propped himself up, laughing at something the man said. Keith felt a small stab of jealousy, but crushed it down, biting his tongue because - god, Lance wouldn’t even _look_ at him on the car ride there, and now he was laughing and talking to some random person, when Keith was _right there_ and had _literally known him for, like, half of his life_? But it was fine! It was fine. Whatever.

Lance pulled his wallet out of his pocket and pulled out a twenty, handing it to the man and continuing to talk, because Lance McClain was the type of person who physically couldn’t not hold a conversation with someone. It was one of the things Keith liked the best about him; even when they were both tired, Lance somehow found a topic for conversation and Keith was happy to listen to whatever Lance wanted to say, even if it was the same story five times in a row or a bunch of information that didn’t mean anything to either of them. Keith just liked Lance’s voice. A lot. 

Lance thanked the man, leaning over the counter to shake hands with him and grab his change, and then turned toward the back of the little shop towards Keith. He was grinning, happier than Keith had seen him all day, crooked smile fastened on his face and his eyes adorably squinty. Keith turned and coughed into his arm, half trying to hide his resulting smile, half trying to get rid of the weird tickling feeling that had spawned in his throat. 

Lance made to sit beside Keith, and then seemed to realize what he was doing and instead plopped down in the booth across from him, effectively eliminating Keith’s giggles and making a sour note simmer in his stomach. Right. Ex-boyfriends now. Keith needed to get a grip. 

“I got you pepperoni,” he said, “that cool?” He passed Keith a cup of ice water, and took a quick sip of one of his own.

“Yeah,” Keith said. 

Lance leaned back in the booth, the cracked plush distorting awkwardly behind his back. He tilted his head back, eyes closed, and sighed loudly through his nose. Keith tried to think of something to say, something to make Lance more comfortable with him without sticking his entire foot in his mouth, but it was proving difficult. Why wasn’t Lance saying anything? Lance usually started their conversations; it was just how they worked. Keith usually fell into easy conversation with him, just following whatever topic Lance picked and saying the appropriate things at the right times to make him laugh and toss an arm around his shoulder, drawing him into his side.

Keith wasn’t sure if Lance could tell how uncomfortable he was, but he came to the rescue, asking Keith, “Did you hear that Hunk asked out Shay?”

Keith had heard this story before, from Lance, maybe a few days ago, but no way was he going to look this gift horse in the mouth and say so. “No,” he replied instead, “what happened?”

Lance grinned and propped his elbows on the table, beaming at Keith, and he could feel his chest tightening at the brightness in his smile and the cheerfulness on his face. (Why did he look so happy when they’d just broken up? Was Keith really bringing him down that much?) “Well,” Lance said, grinning, “technically Shay asked _him_ out, thank God, because to be honest I thought that they would never get together. Hunk’s great but he does _not_ know how to ask out people.”

Keith snorted. “Oh, and you do? How many people have turned you down because of your terrible pickup lines?”

“Hey!” Lance objected. “I have had _plenty_ of people want to date me, and my pickup lines are _great_. You like them, you can’t lie to me! I can see it in your face, you liar!”

“They’re terrible,” Keith said flatly (and they were! And okay, so maybe Keith thought that they were a little adorable and maybe it was just a part of Lance’s charm, but that didn’t mean that they were _good_. They were more like pugs; so terribly ugly that they were cute). 

Lance pointed at him. “You’re going to regret that, Kogane! My pickup lines are the best of the best - I could pick up anyone I wanted with them. Just you wait! I’ll show you!”

“I doubt it’ll be the pickup lines that’ll make people want to date you,” Keith said easily, grinning at him. And then immediately proceeded to choke on his own words, coughing. Jeez, how desperate did he want to look? He didn’t need to tell Lance to figure out how overwhelmingly _gone_ Keith was; they’d just broken up, for quiznak’s sake. He coughed awkwardly, bringing a fist up to his mouth and looked at Lance with pleading eyes. _Please forget I said that_ , he begged, trying to send Lance some sort of telepathic message in order to relieve himself from embarrassment.

Luckily for Keith, Lance ignored the slip up; instead, he leaned across the table to wack at his back a few times, and Keith pretended he didn’t notice himself leaning into the affection. “I meant that, uh, nobody would want to.. Date you. Yeah.” 

Lance snorted. “Sure. Says you.”

… that was fair. Because as much as Keith liked to make fun of Lance and his terrible flirting and honest to god _heinous_ pickup lines, Keith was also the idiot who’d been in love with him for what, three years? Maybe longer? Keith didn’t even bother to keep track anymore; it was such an integral part of him he’d given up on assuming that it would eventually go away like the majority of his crushes had. And while that had been all fine and dandy when he and Lance had been dating, but now he just had to… crush it. Ha. And Lance’s dump flirting wasn’t helping, because, contrary to how he acted, Keith maybe sort of a little bit enjoyed Lance’s stupid pickup lines, even if they wouldn’t ever work on anybody else. He figured it was less of “Oh wow, those pickup lines actually aren’t to bad” (because they were bad. Oh god, they were so bad) and more of a “I’m so freaking in love with you that you could probably set the world on fire and I’d think it was adorable”. If Keith had really been bothered by Lance’s flirting, he wouldn’t have dated him in the first place.

Luckily, Keith was saved by the same bored worker coming over, holding two large pizzas in his hands. A true angel in disguise; if Keith was even somewhat more religious he might have gotten on hands and knees to praise right there in the middle of the store. The worker set one pizza down in front of Lance, and the other in front of Keith, and then brought over two ceramic plates and a large stack of napkins. “Enjoy,” he said flatly.

“Thanks!” Lance said, grinning at him. The worker left, and Keith saw a weird brown stain on the back of his red t-shirt, but decided against saying anything because honestly retail workers needed all the relaxation they could get. Keith would know; he had worked as a waiter at some random restaurant for a few years during college.

The pizza was hot, and both Keith and Lance spent a good amount of time avoiding conversation by cutting themselves a slice and blowing on it. Lance dabbed at his pizza with his napkin (something about the grease not being good for his pores. Keith had told him that if he was really worried about his skin, he should just stop eating pizza, but Lance had punched him playfully in the arm and continued to smother his slice in napkins, so he’d given up). Keith took a bite before it was fully cooled and nearly spat it back out, but managed to force himself to swallow before chugging some ice water to eliminate the burning. Lance laughed, and Keith decided that he should burn himself everytime he went out with Lance if only to hear that happen again.

“So do you have any plans this weekend?” Lance asked Keith. 

He shrugged. “Probably going to do something with Pidge. We heard about something online with an alien sighting an hour away from here and thought it might be cool to check it out,” he lied. He was probably going to lie in his bed and cry the weekend away with the leftover ice cream from Pidge’s visit instead. 

“Oh, cool!” Lance said, grinning at him. “Do you… do you guys think I could come too? I haven’t seen Pidge in a while.”

“Uh,” Keith said, panicking slightly because he didn’t actually have any plans with Pidge that evening; he just didn’t want to seem like a loser who was so hung up on his ex that he didn’t do anything but wallow over the weekend. “I can ask them.”

“Thanks,” Lance said, taking a bite of his now cool enough to eat pizza, chewing with a thoughtful look on his face. Keith bit his tongue in order to not do something stupid, like tell Lance that he wanted kiss that frown away because his concentrated faces were always way hotter than Keith allowed himself to admit.

“No problem,” Keith said finally.

They ate in silence for a bit, and Keith tried to not stare too obviously at Lance, who was being much more quiet than usual. 

“So, are we cool?” Lance asked suddenly.

Keith jumped, panicking for a second thinking that Lance had caught him staring, and coughed. “Uh, what?”

“Like, no big deal that we broke up?” Lance asked. “We’re still friends? Not going to stop hanging out?”

“Um, yeah,” Keith said, swallowing. He tried to hide his grimace, but Keith had very expressive eyebrows (or at least, he had been told), and likely wasn’t succeeding. “I’m still going to want to be friends with you, dumbass. It’s going to take a lot more than breaking up to change that.”

Lance seemed relieved, and Keith couldn’t help the selfish happiness he felt that Lance still wanted to be around him, even if it wasn’t in the romantic way. He reached across the table and took a piece of Lance’s pizza, while he squawked and complained but didn’t actually do anything to stop it from happening. Instead, he took the crusts from Keith’s plate and ate them, jokingly scolding Keith about how childish and wasteful it was to not eat the ends. Keith relaxed into the conversation, sending back quips when needed, just grinning at Lance with a (probably dopey) smile that hopefully didn’t convey how badly Keith was pining after him. 

By the time the two of them had finished their pizzas, Keith was feeling a little sick. Lance commented on it, asking him why he was a little green, and Keith offered that maybe he’d eaten a little too much pizza, even though the two of them had gotten smalls and Keith had definitely eaten more than that before. Lance seemed to accept this, and dropped Keith back at his car, telling him to text him when he got home so that he could be sure that he hadn’t fainted or fallen asleep at the wheel and coasted off the side of the road.

Lance disappeared up into his apartment, and Keith collapsed back into his car, coughing slightly. The fluttering feeling he’d gotten in his throat had grown, like a bird had started clawing its way up from its stomach, flapping its wings against his esophagus and tickling him with its feathers. He leaned over the steering wheel, hacking up a storm. He could feel his stomach churning, waves of nausea rushing up and over him, the pizza sitting uncomfortably in his stomach. He hadn’t felt like throwing up this badly since two years ago, when Shiro had dared him to eat chicken nuggets and a milkshake and then run three miles at six thirty pace. 

He could feel the pizza coming back up his throat, and he swallowed, wincing, not wanting to vomit all over the front of his car. Breathing deeply, he managed to push it back down and pull out of the driveway, now wanting Lance to look out the window and see him regurgitating pizza everywhere. His stomach protested at the bumps in the road, sending up waves of nausea that made him want to hunch over. By the time he’d gotten home, he was swallowing around the bile in his mouth, struggling to keep it in.

His toilet was a welcome addition, and he sat in front of it, letting the warm and chunky liquid pour out of his mouth. It was a waste of money, throwing up all of the pizza he’d just paid for, but it was still a better option than trying to reign it in. After a while, he began to dry heave, just staying over the toilet as he hacked and coughed. He could feel something stuck in his throat, and his saliva had been coming out red for a little bit, and it was getting harder and harder to breath, like something was blocking his airways. 

Thank God he was home now. Keith would probably die of mortification if Lance had seen him like this, sickly and pale, curled around a toilet vomiting his brains up. Just the thought of Lance sent him into another fit of coughing, and he could feel tears rolling down his cheeks. Something large and soft started coming up his throat - it felt much different from anything else. 

And then a large puddle of blood was falling into his toilet, along with a cluster of flowers.

Keith almost shouted in shock, which caused another fit of coughing and more flowers to come out. He had to reach up and help pull some out that got stuck on his teeth and his hands came away flecked with blood. _Flowers?_ Whole, cartoon-like, life-sized flowers? Keith had never eaten flowers, let alone swallowed them whole. There was no way that there were flowers in his stomach. 

Except - 

Unless - 

“Fuck!” Keith choked out, sharply yanking out another flower from his throat and wincing when he felt its stem slice something in the back of his mouth. The warm, metallic taste of his own blood made him grimace, and he leaned over to spit into the toilet, glancing up at the sink and debating whether or not it would be worth it to get up off his knees and rinse out his mouth with tap water. When another coughing fit hit him, he decided against it, just kept pulling flower after flower from his mouth, until there were enough sitting in and around his toilet to make a whole bouquet. 

Finally it stopped, and he relaxed back onto the balls of his feet, breathing heavily. His ears were ringing, a long, singular beep permeating his hearing, and his vision felt slightly blurry. He could still make out the flowers, though, their pale purple petals fully extended like he’d picked them in peak season, leaves and stems ripped from his rough handling. They seemed innocent, like the type that preschoolers would draw in fields, little daisies with their white leaves and yellow middles, except that these were purple, like the water from the toilet, and the blood he’d coughed up with them had stained the soft material. 

Keith waited for another few minutes, wanting to be sure that the episode was well and truly over. He didn’t want to stand up and get back to his bed only to need to rush back to the bathroom. He flushed the toilet after plucking all the flowers out and dumping them into a plastic bag, which he abandoned in the tub, too exhausted to deal with them at the time. He took his trash can with him to his bed, plopping it next to it while he collapsed down onto the soft sheets and blankets, the red plaid a Christmas gift from Pidge a few years ago. He felt gross but couldn’t be bothered to wash himself up aside from wiping his face off with some toilet paper, because… 

Because he’d heard things. Everyone had. It wasn’t new news; people mostly just chose to ignore it, decided that it wasn’t real or that they didn’t think it would ever happen to them, that it was some far-off disease, like when history teachers talked about the black plague; maybe it existed, but it didn’t affect them anymore.

Keith raised his head lazily to look for his phone, and found it lying on the floor at the foot of his bed. He slowly dragged himself across his comforter in order to grab it, just managing to reach far enough to grasp it with the tips of his fingers. He pulled up Yahoo, peering with a frown at it, and typed in, _throwing up flowers disease._

 _Hanahaki,_ it read back, _a relatively unknown and rare disease in which a person suffering from unrequited love grows flowers in their stomach and lungs and proceeds to cough them up until their body parts are completely taken over by the blooms. The types of flowers tend to represent the victim’s object of affection, and can be unique to each person. There are only two known cures at the moment: either having the victim’s love return their feelings, or get a surgery removing the flowers from the body. This comes at a price, however; many times surgeons cannot find the entire flower, as its roots dig into the person’s body parts, and if they do manage to extract it successfully, the victim will lose all memories of the person they love._

“Well, fuck,” Keith said, cringing at how rough and raw his voice sounded. He clicked around, trying in vain to find more information about Hanahaki, but gave up after a few minutes and called Pidge.

“Hey, Kogane,” they said as they picked up. “You alright? I am asking Hunk to make something good for dinner; I can bring you some, if you would like. Is everything okay with the whole Lance situation?”

“Maybe,” Keith croaked. 

“Jeez,” Pidge said. “Your voice sounds shot. Just how much crying did you do last night?”

“Not that much!” Keith objected, but his voice cracked in the middle of his offended objection and made it sound like a lie. “I just - Pidge, do you know anything about Hanahaki?”

Pidge took in a sharp breath. “ _Keith,”_ they said, stressing the syllables of his name, “you - tell me you - do you - are you - ?”

Keith ignored their rambling, pressing on. “It’s when you start throwing up flowers, right? Because you - your love isn’t. It isn’t requited.”

“I’m going to _kill_ Lance,” Pidge hissed.

“It’s not his fault!” Keith yelped. “It’s not like he can _force_ himself into liking me, Pidge. And it’s fine; I’ll be fine. It’ll probably go away and it’ll be all cool again and nothing will happen of it. I was just wondering if you had any information on it, or something.”

“I’m still going to kill him,” Pidge swore. “You don’t know the full story, Keith, and I swear to god - I’m going over there right now. I’ll chew him out for you, don’t worry.”

“ _Pidge!_ ” Keith snapped into the phone. “You aren’t telling him a thing about this, you got it? Not one word, or I’ll end you. I really, really don’t want him to know about this, alright? Please, _please_ don’t tell him.”

Silence on Pidge’s end, and then, finally, “Fine,” they decide. “But, Keith - you were in love with him for so long before you two got together, and you were so happy - I’m sorry, but there’s no way you’re getting over him. I think it’s written into your DNA: must be constantly in love with Lance McClain, or whatever. Please consider at least - at least telling him.”

“No way, Pidge, he just broke up with me! It’s not like it’s before were started dating, and there was actually a change he might like me back. He just decided that I wasn’t good enough for him - we’re done. Forever. I’ll find a way to get over him, and if I don’t, I’ll get the surgery. But that’ll be a last resort. Don’t worry about me, Pidge; it’ll be fine.”

“Sure,” Pidge said, sounding doubtful. 

“It’ll be fine,” Keith repeated, insistent. 

“Okay,” Pidge agreed, but Keith could tell that they were just saying that to appease him. Still, it was better than them freaking out and going to Lance, who would probably hate Keith for still being _this_ in love with him, being so freaking infatuated that his body was _straight up betraying him_. 

“Hey, could you maybe identify these flowers for me?” Keith asked. “I have just them in a plastic bag next to my bed, and I don’t really know what to do with them, and I read somewhere that, uh, they are supposed to represent… who you love.”

“Yeah,” Pidge agreed. “Hey.. can I come over? I just want to make sure you are okay, since I assume you’re not going to go to a doctor?”

“It’s not that serious,” Keith assured them. “I -” he paused, remembering the blooms and their thorns pouring out of his mouth, and corrected, “I only threw up a little bit.”

“ _Keith_ ,” Pidge said, sounding disappointed in him. “I’m coming over. Hunk made brownies last night, so I’ll bring those, too. I’ll do some research on Hanahaki for you, alright? I think I read somewhere that if you avoid the person, you’ll last longer, but - but it really depends on the person, so you’ve got to be _careful_ Keith. Please.”

“Oh, um, about that,” Keith said, laughing nervously. “I may or may not have told Lance that we were hanging out this weekend, and then he asked to come with us?”

“ _Keith_.” Pidge sounded slightly murderous, but Keith for once felt safe, since he doubted they’d actually do anything if he was already dying. “I’m calling him and telling him he can’t come.”

“No!” Keith yelped. “It’s fine, Pidge. I - I want to hang out with him.”

They sound way too disapproving. “Keith, he’s literally _killing_ you - well, not on purpose, but it is his fault - and you’re still so smitten you need to hang out with him more even though it’ll be at the cost of your own health? Just - Keith. Stay home, c’mon. If you’re not going to tell him, you need to at least _attempt_ to preserve yourself.”

“He’s my best friend, er, besides you, Pidge,” Keith argued. “I want to spend at least some time with him.”

He could practically hear their scowl over the phone. “Fine, but only because I know you will not change your mind. But here’s the deal - we can hang out with Lance, but I am sleeping over at your house every night until - until whenever. Until things get better.”

“That’s fine,” Keith agreed. 

“I’m heading over now,” Pidge promised, and hung up.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for talks of dog/wolf attacks, though nothing physical happens besides chasing.

Keith didn’t get better over the course of the week, no matter how much he lied to Pidge and said that the vomiting had stopped and that the flowers were no longer growing and that his lungs didn’t feel like they were being filled with ash. Keith was wrong in the idea that he could ever get over Lance, because he literally couldn’t, even when his life depended on it. Keith was tired, and his throat was constantly raw, and sometimes he’d get bloody noses that would last for too long and no matter how many weird tricks he looked up on the internet to stop them they wouldn’t. 

But that did not mean that Keith was going to go against his word. Because he invited Lance and Pidge out for cryptid hunting, and there was no way in hell that he was going back on his word just because he was in a little pain. And since he was dying, well, he wanted to spend as much time with his best friends as possible, even if Lance was the one causing his death. 

Pidge had made it clear how much they despised Keith’s stubbornness, but they weren’t the ones who had been going through Lance withdrawal, and they weren’t the ones totally in love with him. He knew Pidge just wanted the best for him (just wanted him to get the surgery and be done with it and not  _ die _ ) but Lance had been such an integral part of Keith’s life that he was honestly kind of scared of how he would act without memories of him. Lance changed Keith, a lot, and he was not sure how his own psyche would react to losing him, not sure if he would have gotten out of his childhood funk without him, not sure if he’d still be the same person he was today if he completely erased Lance from his life. 

And so Keith asked Pidge and Lance if they wanted to go into the woods for their cryptid adventure, and he packed medicine and way too many cough drops and about three boxes of tea in hopes of soothing his throat. Pidge made him bring an actual tent this time, instead of his usual tarp, and forced their extra thick sleeping bag on him, too, like they thought that the warmth would save him, or something. Keith wasn’t sure what they were thinking, but if it made them feel better, he wasn’t going to argue with them. They deserved at least that. 

The patch of woods they’d chosen for this outing was a few hours away from their homes. Pidge decided to drive, even though Keith usually did, and they all piled into their car early in the morning to get out in time. Lance was late, as usual, but Pidge stormed inside his apartment at five in the morning and made a racket, so it was only by a few minutes. He came out with bags under his eyes, hair sticking up in random directions instead of stylized like it usually was, and his green jacket slung over his arm. Keith had already claimed shotgun, so Lance threw himself into the back, spreading himself over all three seats and dumping his bag at his feet.

“You okay?” Keith said, amused, and also desperately trying to distract himself from thinking about the times when this view - Lance, thoroughly himself, in all his morning glory, yawning and stretching, skin on display and red imprints on his face from falling asleep on his hands - was all for Keith. It reminded him of when they were dating and Keith was invited over to stay the night at his apartment, and woke up early to see Lance, still asleep, sprawled across the mattress with half of the blankets off (he’d always ran hot) and drool dried on his chin, which really should have been disgusting but just made Keith want to smother him in affection. 

He could practically feel the flowers crawling their way up his throat, and took a big gulp of honeyed tea in order to hold off the coughing fit that was likely to come.

Pidge hopped back into the car, much too cheerful for that early in the morning (likely due to the amount of coffee they chugged on a daily basis), and slammed the key into the ignition, pulling out of the driveway and patting the little miniature robot that they kept on their car’s dashboard. It bobbled its head as cracks and bumps in the road shifted the car, and flashed its LED eyes at them. “Lance was still asleep when I got in there,” Pidge snitched with a snicker, smirking at the boy lying prostrate on the back seats. 

“Was not,” Lance mumbled - or at least, that’s what it sounded like. His face was smushed into the stained gray seats of the car, which were muffling his words and making him sound more like a snuffling puppy than a person. 

“He was,” Pidge said, smug in the notion that they had won the argument. “Also, put your seatbelt on, you tall idiot. If you die I am not getting sued.”

Lance made a groaning sound into the seat that trailed off into a muttering of gibberish, but he finally heaved himself up and flopped against the window, making grabby hands at the seatbelt until he had grasped it and clicked it into its bottom part. “I’m taking a nap,” he mumbled, eyes already closed and head rolling to the side, “don’t wake me.” A few pieces of his hair were sticking up with static at the back of his head, and Keith had to fight himself in order to not reach back and pet them down.

“We’ll get you up when we get there,” Pidge promised. 

“No,” Lance whined, drawing out the “o” sound. “Why do you wake up so  _ early _ ?”

“You brought this upon yourself,” Keith snorted, internally screaming at how  _ cute  _ Lance was acting. His cheek was pressed up against the window and gave the impression of a younger Lance, one with chubby cheeks and big eyes, a small pout on his face like the type that Mrs. McClain had shown Keith in photos. “You were the one who wanted to come with us. You should have expected this to happen.”

“Shut up,” Lance complained. “I’m going to sleep. Don’t wake me up unless the world’s ending.”

“Well, if we see this cryptid, it’s going to feel like the end of the world,” Pidge crowed. They waved a hand at the back of their car, pointing to a dark bag of their equipment. “This could be revolutionary! We just need to get proof of this guy’s teleportation powers, and then -”

“Wait,” Lance said, “teleportation powers?” He raised his right eyebrow, and somehow managed to look both skeptical and kissable at the same time.

“Did you not read any of the articles I sent you?” Pidge sounded exasperated. 

“I was  _ sleeping _ ,” Lance retorted. “You sent me those texts at like three in the morning!”

“Oh, just go to sleep,” Pidge grumbled. They hunched down over the wheel, and merged into another lane on the highway. “We’ll be there in a bit. Get your goddamn beauty sleep, or whatever. You need it.”

“I feel like that’s supposed to be a dig at me,” Lance mused, squinting at them, “but I’m just going to take it as the gift that it is.” He reached down into his bag and spent a good few minutes shifting through the clothes haphazardly thrown into it until he found his phone and a pair of headphones, which he immediately stuck in, and closed his eyes, leaning against the back of the seat. 

“Keith,” Pidge said, and he snapped out of his staring to glance at them, away from the boy in the backseat. “Stop making that face. You look like a mooning puppy. It’s bad enough that your flowers are  _ seaside daisies _ . I mean, how much more whipped can you get?”

His face colored, and he twisted around to stare ahead at the dark road, lit only by the car’s headlights and the occasional vehicle coming in the opposite direction. He crossed his arms and scowled at a tree in the distance, refusing to turn back around, no matter how badly he was tempted. He heard Lance make a small noise in his (possibly fake?) slumber, and had to physically restrain himself from melting. Pidge was definitely judging him from the driver’s seat.

“This was definitely a bad idea,” Pidge warned. “Do I need to reiterate again how much I hate this idea?”

“I think you’ve said it enough,” Keith said flatly. “Pidge, it’ll be fine. I probably just need this time to get over him, and everything will work out well. If it gets worse…” He sighed. “I’ll consider the surgery, alright?”

He could see Pidge eyeing him, but stubbornly refused to turn and look at them, instead opting for his continued focus on a red mailbox in the distance. 

“I still don’t like it,” Pidge told him. “Just… please don’t make us regret this. I know I joke with you, Keith, but I actually care.” They cleared their throat, wrinkling their nose. “I’ll kick your ass to the moon and back if you hurt yourself for this. And I’ll kick Lance’s, too. And then I’ll hack into the universe to bring you back to life over and over so that I can kill you again and again.”

Keith snorted, but the tension left the two of them, and they sat in silence as the drive continued, both increasingly aware of the boy asleep in the backseat. 

-

Pidge woke Lance up from his nap when they got to the forest. As he groggily sat up and rubbed his eyes, Pidge and Keith hopped out to start setting up the tents in their chosen campsite. Keith handled all of the normal camping stuff while Pidge collected their precious technology and placed it down carefully on a tarp they laid on the ground near the center of the clearing. Then they began to help Keith clear branches and leaves in order to fashion themselves a place to sleep. 

Lance stumbled out of the car a few minutes later, squinting from the sun and itching his arm. He flopped down on a log Pidge had dragged into the center of the campsite with a huff, and chugged some water from a bottle that he had brought with him. 

By nightfall, the camp was set up. It would have been done earlier, but Pidge needed much of their time to set up their gadgets, and they refused to allow Keith or Lance to touch anything. Instead, they struggled to make some food over the fire. While the two of them could make the most basic of food on a stove, the fire was a different story. Lance speared a hot dog on a stick and held it over the flames, but it fell off halfway through cooking and spent a few good minutes on fire at the bottom of the pit, which was amusing but ultimately unhelpful for their appetites. Keith knew how to make potatoes, but they lacked tinfoil, so they settled for awkwardly laying their hot dogs on a relatively clean rock next to the fire. It probably wasn’t healthy, but Keith was dying anyway, so he wasn’t too worried. 

Pidge ambled over, finished fiddling with whatever they were doing, and joined the two of them on the log. They snatched up a hot dog bun and stuffed half into their mouth, while Lance and Keith raised their eyebrows off to the side.

“You’ve been trying to make these hot dogs for half an hour,” Pidge explained. “I’m hungry. This is taking too long.”

“Sorry,” Keith apologized. “Lance dropped one in the fire.”

Lance shoved him. “It was not my fault! The stick didn’t have a firm grip on it! Plus, Keith was the one who put it on!”

“You should have pulled it off the fire  _ before _ it started to droop and pushed it back on,” Keith retorted. “It’s not  _ my  _ fault you have no idea how to cook food. You’re probably one of those heathens who sets their marshmallows on fire, aren’t you?”

“And so what if I am?” Lance defended himself.

“Then we never should have let you cook in the first place,” Keith argued. “Nobody likes hot dogs  _ burned _ , Lance.”

Pidge sighed. “We should have just brought hamburgers and a grate,” they said mournfully, though Keith and Lance paid them no notice and continued their arguing. 

By the time the sun set, the three had settled into camp. Pidge had forced Keith into a tent with them, and had made Lance take the small, ratty one for himself. Pidge gave them both strict orders to wake up early the next morning, and then retreated to bed. 

“Let’s play Gin Rummy,” Lance suggested, pulling out a deck of cards that Keith recognized as the pack he’d bought for Lance a year ago. Its back had a swirly red and blue nebula and there were cute cartoon space cats on the face side of the cards. Keith felt a small bite of satisfaction that even if Lance didn’t want to date him anymore, there were claims of Keith’s impact on his life all over, from the gifts that he used to some of their shared habits. Take that, future Lance suitors. Keith had already claimed that spot, like a dog marking his territory. He’d peed all over that shit. (God, Lance really  _ was  _ influencing him)

Lance won the first round. He jumped up into the air, pumping his fists with a triumphant yell, but one incoherent demon screech from Pidge’s tent made both boys exchange wary glances and shut their mouths quickly. Keith gestured him back over, grinning as Lance plopped back down on the log next to him, still doing silent victory dances in the lights from the fire. 

By the time they were on their third round, Keith was beginning to feel drowsy. He tossed his cards carelessly at Lance, who squawked as he tried to catch the entire hand while they flapped in every direction. Then he pulled himself off the log onto the grass, thankful that he was wearing pants in order to stop it from itching his legs, and settled down against Lance’s knees, leaning back into him. Lance made a surprised sound behind him and Keith almost debated in his sleep-deprived mind (crying yourself to sleep is really not a great way to get a ton of rest) whether or not he should really be cuddling his ex-boyfriend who he was really not over yet, but ultimately gave up and curled closer to him.

“You okay, buddy?” Lance asked. Keith’s eyes were closed, but he felt as long fingers began to comb through his hair, short nails scratching at his scalp and rubbing. A small part of him, deep down and inside, protested quietly, but the flowers had been scarce most of the day, except for a short part right after lunch when Lance had accidentally called him baby and Keith had been forced to go throw up in the woods, and Keith began to wonder whether Pidge was wrong. Maybe being closer to the person you needed made everything better. Either way, Keith wouldn’t give this up for the world; if he just closed his eyes and blocked out the past couple of days, he could pretend that this was back when they were still dating, when he wasn’t dying, when things didn’t feel so foreign, and when their friendship wasn’t like skating across thin black ice, wondering if drifting to the wrong part of the pond would finally take you out. 

Keith heard Lance sigh behind him, weaving one part of his bangs into a small braid. “Hey,” he said softly, and Keith melted into his touch. “Keith, buddy, you should get in the tent.”

Keith made a small muffled noise of protest and lifted his head up to give Lance a squinty-eyed glare. 

“Pidge will kill me if you sleep out here in the cold,” Lance warned. 

“They’re already asleep anyway,” Keith murmured into Lance’s knees, face pressed into his right leg. 

“Yeah,” Lance snorted, “but that won’t stop them from killing me in the morning. C’mon,” he urged, nudging Keith forward and shifting on the log. “Sleep time. We have a mythical wolf to find tomorrow.”

“Not mythical,” Keith argued. “‘Tis real.”

“Sure,” Lance said fondly. “Well, you’ll never find your teleporting wolf unless you get enough sleep.”

With a sigh, Keith heaved himself to his feet. He turned around and held out a hand for Lance, smiling tiredly. The other boy grabbed his hand and Keith yanked him up from the log, appreciating the way the firelight danced on his skin and turned his hair to golden threads, like Rumplestilskin turning hay into gold. Lance’s grin was kind of crooked, but Keith suddenly understood all of those female protagonists in YA stories finding smiles like his endearing; it changed his face, made it less symmetrical, more open and happy. 

“See you in the morning, buddy,” Lance said, and Keith nodded. He wobbled unsteadily over to Pidge’s tent and slowly opened the zipper, trying not to wake them, though they were fiddling with some random piece of complicated tech that made Keith feel dizzy just looking at it. 

“You okay?” they asked him as he flopped to the ground. 

Keith flopped down on his sleeping bag. “Goddamnit,” he groaned, covering his face in his hands. “He’s really not making this any easier, is he? How am I supposed to get over him if he’s - if he’s gonna act like that all the time?!”

Pidge snorted. “I told you so. And Lance is a highly tactile person; what were you expecting?” They looked up from what they were tinkering with, and frowned at him. “Hey - are you okay? You’re looking a little pale.”

Keith blinked in confusion, and then felt it: the telltale feeling of the flowers tickling his throat with their soft petals as they detached themselves from his lungs, thorns scraping at his airways. “Oh,” he said, voice scratchy.

Pidge’s eyes widened in alarm. Keith winced; he’d been trying for the past couple of days to avoid having to do any of the actual throwing up in front of them, but it looked like his luck had run out. He gestured awkwardly at the back of the tent and rasped, “Do you have a - plastic bag?” 

“Yeah,” Pidge said quickly, handing it over. 

“This is going to be kind of hard to explain to Lance,” Pidge said as they watched him stick two fingers down his throat to yank at a particularly stuck flower. A cough wracked his body, and they leaned over to rub at his back as he hacked into the plastic bag (it, ironically, had Dalton’s logo scrawled across the side). “How are we going to tell him we just happened to have a bag full of,” they glanced down and quickly looked back up, “bloody seaside daisies?”

Keith didn’t bother replying, too busy coughing up blue-purple petals and red liquid, but Pidge continued on. Keith wondered in the back of his mind if this was a coping mechanism for them; it might be easier to deal with the reality that their best friend was going to die if they worked their way through it logically, or had something else to worry about. He nodded absentmindedly. 

“Quiznak, Keith,” Pidge gasped, grabbing one of his wrists. “I can see all your veins through here. I think this was a bad idea. We should go home. I was wrong thinking you’d be able to handle this. We can come back for the cosmic wolf another time. Please let me take you home.”

After the coughing had stopped (though the nausea was still pressing at the back of his throat like a hand wrapped around his windpipe), he glared up at them. “No way, Pidge. This is my last real weekend to enjoy myself and live like a normal person before I have to start… setting things up. For after. Just give me this. Look - I’ll even go to the doctor for a consultation about the surgery after this, alright?” He sighed, staring furiously down at the bag in his hands and blinking away the blurriness that threatened to take over his eyes. “If I’m going to forget Lance, I want to have at least a few more memories with him,” he admitted, much quieter than before. 

Pidge delicately took the bag from his fingers. They knotted it and shoved it in the corner of the tent, chucking a blanket over it. “Alright,” they acquiesced, “one more day and night. But the second we get home, I’m helping you get in contact with that doctor. And nothing too physically strenuous tomorrow. The flowers are probably making it harder to breathe, and I don’t want you passing out or something.”

Keith nodded. He wiped off his mouth with his sleeve and flopped back down onto his sleeping bag, grunting as some stick or stone underneath pushed up into his back. “Night, Pidgey,” he said. 

They snorted, but his condition must have really been weighing on them, because they offered no annoyed rebuttal and simply replied, “Night, Kogane.”

-

The next morning marked the beginning of their hunt for their cosmic wolf. Pidge woke Keith up, and then screamed in Lance’s ear, causing him to flail wildly and hit them with one of his long arms. They made oatmeal over the fire and ate it as Pidge told them the plan.

“So yesterday, while you two were failing at setting up the tents, I put some motion sensors around the woods, along with a few -” and then they spiraled off into some rant about technology that neither Keith nor Lance had the capacity to understand. Once they caught sight of their dumbfounded expressions, they sighed and spoke, “Simply, it’ll alert me if we get any readings close to the teleportation powers that the wolf has.” 

“Cool,” Lance said. Keith nodded his agreement. 

“There were a couple of alerts from last night, so we’re going to split up and head towards them.” They handed both Keith and Lance some sort of walkie-talkie-like object, and pointed at colorful buttons as they continued to explain, “These are so we can talk to each other and will have our locations in case one of us finds the wolf. They also have cameras so we can get proof of its existence.” They looked up. “Any questions?”

“No, Professor,” Lance teased. He cuffed them over the head. “Let’s get going, then. Where do you want me?”

Pidge directed them into separate directions into the woods. Keith clutched his walkie-talkie close and stuffed his other hand into the pocket of his sweatshirt. He probably shouldn't have worn something so brightly colored (red didn’t really blend into the luscious green forest scenery), but it was too late to change clothes, and he doubted that anything bad would happen anyway. 

The trees passed in silence except for the rustling of the leaves and the crunch of the ground under his boots. Keith spotted a deer, but it spooked and ran away, tail sticking straight up into the air. After that, all he saw were squirrels and chipmunks, along with a few different species of birds that he couldn’t identify. He stepped over a sprig of what might have been poison ivy, and reached up to itch at a mosquito bite on his neck. 

He must have been walking for thirty minutes when he felt the air change around him. It wasn’t temperature, exactly, but it made the hair on the back of his neck rise and goosebumps erupt across his arms and legs like volcanoes from the ocean. He paused, frozen, eyes darting around to try and get a glimpse of whatever was causing tension in the air, but all he could see were the green leaves of the trees and the thorny bushes on the forest floor. 

He crossed his arms and tried to make himself taller, straightening his spine and pulling his shoulders back. And then - there.

The wolf was beautiful. Keith was pretty sure his jaw dropped and was now lying broken on the ferns beneath his boots, because he was possibly the most gorgeous thing he’d ever seen. He was a dark gray, like the color of clouds before a storm, and had flashes of blue and purple scattered throughout his fur. His large, dark eyes were fixed on Keith, glassy, smooth things like pebbles coated in glass. He sucked in a breath, and fumbled to grab Pidge’s walkie-talkie-camera-hybrid, jerking it up to his head and trying to catch a photo and also the breath that seemed to have been stolen with the appearance of the wolf.

And then a yell.

Suddenly, Lance was there, crashing through the bushes, panting like a dehydrated dog and sweating enough to soak parts of his shirt. He slammed one palm against a tree as he leaned against it, gasping for air, and pointed one sweaty hand at the wolf. “You found him!” he cried, beaming at Keith, who tried to pretend that his flushed cheeks and pleased smile were more directed towards the wolf than towards Lance. Lance ran over, tossing an arm over Keith’s shoulders, and drawing him towards the wolf. He continued to talk, waving his arms excitedly, and Keith melted into his touch, grinning privately to himself. Lance’s voice was loud, and it almost overpowered the bark of the wolf. 

Lance paused, mouth frozen open, and his eyes flickered over to the wolf. He and Keith exchanged glances, eyeing each other warily, and when the wolf took a step towards them, Lance grabbed Keith’s arm and jerked him back towards the trees from which he came. Keith stumbled a little before finding his footing and joining Lance in their run. While the other boy’s legs were longer, Keith ran five miles every morning and sometimes did sprinting workouts with his brother, so they easily kept pace with each other, moving in sync across the trees. 

As they passed a fallen birch, Keith felt goosebumps erupt across his skin, a shiver raking down his spine like ice cubes were being shoved down his shirt. The air seemed to shimmer for a moment, and then there was a loud  _ crack!  _ and the wolf was in front of them again. 

Lance skidded to a stop, the hand still wrapped around Keith’s arm pulling him behind him. He shoved Keith back in the direction they’d come, yelling, “Go! Go!”

“It can teleport!” Keith gasped back between breaths. “We can’t outrun something that can  _ teleport _ !”

“I know,” Lance said. “I’m thinking of something.” 

The two of them could hear the wolf pounding behind them, slowly gaining, and zigzagged in another direction when they heard the loud crackle of the wolf’s magic. Lance seemed to spot something and tugged Keith in a different direction, towards a small hill littered with rocks.

“Are you kidding me?” Keith demanded. “It can climb! He’s going to corner us!”

Lance ignored him, dragging him along even as Keith tried to turn them in a different direction. He directed the two towards a small gap in the rocks, and Keith let him, following him into the small cavern.

“It probably can’t teleport into spaces too small for him,” Lance explained, ducking in after shoving Keith inside.

The cave was definitely too small for the wolf. It was more of a crevice, if Keith was being honest, just a small slit between two large rock faces, barely big enough for the two of them to squeeze into. Keith ignored the feel of Lance pressed up against him, his warm skin and soft clothes igniting the flowers within like pouring a storm full of water on a dehydrated desert. Keith could almost feel them moving around in his gut, wriggling next to each other as they fought for room to grow in his flesh. It made him slightly nauseous.

“We should warn Pidge,” Lance said. There were shuffling noises outside, and then, over Lance’s shoulder, Keith saw the wolf, nosing around the rock formation. He looked up and started right at them, and Keith felt a shiver go down his spine as large, mournful eyes peered straight into his soul. He stepped closer to the entrance of the crevice, and Keith pressed his back against the cold wall, grabbing Lance by his arm and hip to pull him further away from the wolf’s inquisitive snout. “Thanks,” he murmured, before grabbing Pidge’s modified walkie talkie and pressing random buttons.

Outside the cave, the wolf began to pace. Keith could see him, going back and forth across the entrance, sometimes pausing to peer in again. At one point, he whined pitifully, pawing at the rocks in the entrance. He even tried teleporting; his outline became all blurry, and that now familiar, hair-raising sensation made Keith shiver and Lance press a little closer, crushing into his already compressed chest. He hoped he could pass off his heavy, clogged breathing as a symptom of his fear and not, y’know, his deadly sickness.

Pidge was saying something to Lance, but Keith kept his eyes on the wolf, twisting on his side a little bit so that Lance wasn’t all the way in the entrance. The wolf stuck his face into the entrance of the cave, and Keith gasped, jerking Lance into the back of the cave wall, half covering him as Lance made a small noise of surprise. This turned out to be a mistake because, for some reason, the damn flowers in Keith’s chest decided that a small bit of movement (never mind that Keith had literally just been sprinting through the forest, but whatever) and the close proximity of his ex-boyfriend was enough to trigger them into exploding. 

Keith could distantly hear Pidge’s staticy voice crying out through the microphone and Lance’s panicked hands brushing against Keith’s back, but his own coughs took precedence, stealing his attention away from his friends and forcing it upon only the hacking of his own lungs and the red specks that flew from his lips along with the petals. Lance made a startled noise as a purple flower fell past Keith’s lips and dropped down to be caught on where their shoulders were pressed together. 

“Keith! Keith, are you alright?” Pidge was yelling. 

Lance began to slap Keith’s back, encouraging the flowers as they poured out, holding his shaking body tightly. The wolf, almost as if he understood the severity of the situation, remained quiet and out of the way, or at least unnoticeable to Keith’s distracted senses. The only things he could focus on were his coughs and the deep ache in his throat and his chest and the way the petals ticked his chin and Lance’s hands pressed against his sides, burning holes all the way through his body.

He lost track of time, just leaning against Lance and trying not to let the flowers choke him, turning away from Lance every now and again in order to reach into his mouth and tug out a particularly stubborn stem. Pidge had gone quiet, and Keith hoped it was either because they were getting help or because they were getting the fuck out of this forest and away from the wolf still sitting outside of the cave. 

When the coughing finally stopped, Keith came back to Lance rubbing soothing hands over his back, letting the trembling boy lean against him. There were flowers all around them like some shitty, low-budget music video directed by an angsty teen girl, all violet petals and red splatters, a purple haze. Lance was whispering quietly in his ears, and when they finally stopped ringing, Keith could make out small comforts, Lance telling him over and over that he was okay and that it would all be fine in just a moment. 

They stood in silence for a good few minutes before Lance drew back a little, looking down at Keith with a serious look on his face. “Who is it?” he demanded.

Keith pursed his lips, ducking his head to stare at his feet.

“Uh uh,” Lance said, reaching up and cupping his cheek with one hand. With the other, he drew Keith’s face up until he was looking Lance in the eyes. “This is serious, Keith. Life threatening. You need to talk to me so that I can help you. Who is it?”

Keith scowled, shuffling his feet. The cat was out of the bag, he guessed. He hadn’t wanted Lance to find out, hadn’t wanted to look like the obsessive ex boyfriend who could never get over their first love, but it seemed like he had no choice. At least by the end of this he probably wouldn’t remember Lance anyway; ignorance would save him from the embarrassment. Still, he didn’t reply for what felt like ages, and though Lance seemed impatient, he thankfully allowed Keith this freedom until he was ready. “Isn’t it obvious?” Keith muttered after a while.

Lance sucked in a breath. “ _ Keith _ ,” he said.

Keith jerked back a little. “It’s fine,” he said sharply, reaching up to tear Lance’s hands away from his face and staring furiously at the ground. “You don’t have to do anything. I was going to get the surgery after this weekend anyway. I know you don’t… I know you don’t feel that way about me anymore.” 

“That’s not -” Lance started. “What makes you think I don’t anymore?”

Keith scoffed, wincing as the motion made the pain in his throat flare up. “You broke up with me, idiot! Is there any more obvious way to say that you’re not interested?” He swallowed hard, a stinging in his nose the tell-tale sign of crying, and blinked desperately in order to dispel the tears welling up there.

“Keith  _ no _ ,” Lance cried. He grabbed Keith by his shoulders and pulled him in. “That is so, so not why I broke up with you. Just - let me explain -”

They were interrupted by a loud bark. They both flinched, knocking into each other, and Lance cursed under his breath. He wrapped his arms around Keith, bringing him close, and pressed their foreheads together, looking dreadfully regretful. “You’re wrong,” he said in a low voice. Keith stared up at him with large eyes. “I do love you,” Lance promised. “God, Keith, I’m so sorry. I love you so much.” 

They both watched each other, gazing into each other’s eyes like the most cliche couple in the universe, until Keith felt something painful lurch in his stomach and he gagged, twisting away from Lance so he could lean over the floor of the cave as the flowers began to explode outward once again. 

“What the fuck?!” Lance yelled. “Did you not hear me?  _ Keith!  _ I love you!” Keith felt warm hands on his shoulders, running over his heaving back and pulling his hair away from his face so he could more easily watch the bloody petals fountain down. Lance rubbed over his back, slowly becoming more and more frantic as it became increasingly obvious that the flowers weren’t stopping. Keith distantly heard him call Pidge again, shouting at them through their machine, something about ambulances in the middle of the forests and stretchers. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Lance swore, rubbing Keith’s back as a particularly bad cough wracked his body. “Shit, baby, I gotta get you help.” He stole a glance at the wolf still waiting outside the cave and winced. “Fuck it,” he hissed, slapping Keith’s back one last time. “Stay here, baby, alright? I’m gunna go get you help.”

_ No _ , Keith wanted to say.  _ You can’t outrun or out fight the wolf. Don’t leave me _ . But the flowers prevented him from saying anything or even reaching out to Lance, keeping his hands occupied with pulling out stuck blooms from the back of his throat. 

And then Lance was gone, disappearing out the cave. Keith twisted slightly, trying to see what was happening, and not even his own hacking or gagging could drown out the loud barks that the wolf exploded in once Lance came out of their hiding spot. Keith winced, tensing as he waited to hear Lance’s cries of pain as the wolf went to town on him, not sure if he’d be able to handle seeing that right before his eyes. 

It didn’t come. Instead, Lance made a surprised sound, and Keith twisted painfully, putting both hands on the cave wall in order to catch a glimpse of what was happening. The wolf was on top of Lance, yes, but he wasn’t biting; instead, his mouth was open and his tongue was lolling out in what looked more like a dopey golden retriever than a fierce cosmic wolf. His tail wagged as Lance scratched behind his ears, looking bewildered at his change in tone. Keith smiled around the flowers.

His coughing seemed to awaken Lance from his shock, because he shoved the wolf’s head away, ignoring his whines, and rushed back to Keith, throwing an arm around him. He was surrounded in a small army of flowers now, throat so scratched up it felt like there was an angry cat in there, clawing away. Lance drew Keith out of the cave, half-carrying him as he gasped for air, frantically speaking to Pidge on his walkie talkie. Keith could only catch snippets of their conversation, just words like “emergency” and “Hanahaki” and “lost”. 

They stood like that for a precarious minute, Keith still vomiting flowers and Lance still yelling at Pidge in a panicked tone. The wolf nosed around them, nudging their hands as though looking for pets, but Lance ignored it and Keith was too busy gagging to do anything else. 

“Pidge,” Lance was saying. “You have to get here quicker. Keith - there’s something wrong with him! Pidge it should be fine; I told him I love him! Why hasn’t it stopped yet?” He rubbed frantic circles into Keith’s back.

“I don’t know,” Pidge said. “But remember that this is all  _ your  _ fault, Lance. You need to have better communication, okay? Don’t just assume what Keith’s feeling! Fucking talk it out!”

“I know, I know,” Lance cried. “Just get here quick, please!”

“I’m going as fast as I can,” Pidge promised. Keith wretched into the grass. The part of the forest where he was standing was littered in petals. In the corner of his vision, Keith saw the wolf’s face pointing towards his, but Lance’s had battered him away. He snorted, shaking his fur, and Keith felt that hair-raising, goosebump-becoming feeling again. It didn’t do much for his lungs, and it caused him to flinch back as the wolf teleported in front of him.

“Holy shit,” Lance said. “Fuck, this is going to be so stupid.” He clutched Keith closer to him, and then grabbed a fistful of the wolf’s scruff, staring straight into his eyes. “Can you teleport us to a hospital?” he asked slowly. “Hos-pi-tal,” he said again, even more slowly. 

The wolf probably didn’t understand, but it was a last-ditch attempt. Keith’s coughing was getting worse; it sounded like his entire lungs were clogged, a deep-in-your-chest hack that hurt just to listen to. The flowers were becoming increasingly more bloody, like they were pulling up more of Keith’s chest as they went along, and Pidge probably wouldn’t be able to get there in time. 

Still, that feeling came again. The wolf touched his nose to Keith’s bowed forehead, and there was that feeling again, before there was a loud crack and they were sent spiraling. 

As soon as Keith came to again (on his hands and knees, because that teleportation thing was dizzying), he vomited, a mixture of flowers and blood and the oatmeal he’d eaten for breakfast. Lance scrambled to his feet and raced inside a blurry building; Keith focused on his own problems. The wolf nudged him, and he felt a soft, warm tail wrap around him before his vision filled with black spots and he flopped face-first into the pavement. 

-

Keith awoke to a mint green hospital room. His throat was still vaguely sore, but nowhere near as bad as it had been before. He was lying in a bed of thin sheets, head propped up on a pillow, and when he shifted to the right he saw Lance, hovering over him with a hopeful look on his face. When the two made eye contact Lance let out a sigh of relief, slumping down over Keith’s body.

“You scared me so bad,” Lance confessed. He reached over and took one of Keith’s limp hands, bringing it to press against his chest. “Promise me you’ll let me know if anything that serious happens again, alright?”

“Is it gone?” Keith asked. His voice was croaky from being ripped apart and unused, his arms stiff as he reached up to push his hair away from his face and itch at a spot on his nose.

“You’re all cleared,” Lance assured him. “Apparently that whole flower thing was just the disease getting expelled from your body. I’m sorry that it hurt so much, but you’re safe now, at least. You just have to drink a lot of water, and I think they’re giving you heavy-duty cough drops.” 

“Good,” Keith said. He used his free hand to prop himself up, leaning against the headboard, and drew his other away from Lance to rest in his lap, trying to ignore the hurt look that flashed over his usually smiling face. “Look, Lance,” he said instead, “we’ve got to get this straight. I know that you love me - obviously you have to, or else this wouldn’t be gone - but why’d you break up with me? I thought - I thought we were good. What we had was so good.” He slumped a little in his bed. “I don’t want to be with you if you’re not happy like that. You can still love someone and… not want to be with them.” The words left a sour note in his mouth; if he was being honest, Keith would rather just ignore the entire thing, but he couldn’t do that, to himself or Lance. He had to talk it out. 

“I do want to be with you,” Lance promised. “I made a mistake - massive mistake. I’ll take the blame for that. I just… this is going to sound so stupid.” Keith waited, watching as a thousand different, tortured expressions passed over Lance’s face. “You changed a bit, when we got together?

“You changed a little, and it scared me. I don’t know. You seemed to stop doing a lot of the things you used to like to do - like, you used to hang out with Pidge a ton, but once we started dating it almost seemed as though you were brushing them off to hang out with me. And we always used to watch those conspiracy documentaries because you loved them, but once we started dating you always picked something that I would have chosen. And you stopped being so open; we used to have these deep conversations at three in the morning on the phone across campus, about the universe and everything wrong with society, but those all… stopped? I don’t know; it just didn’t seem… right. I thought maybe you were faking it just to make me happy. Or that you were actually changing yourself for me.

“Keith, baby, I love you. You don’t have to act differently for me to want you. I’ve seen you at your rock bottom, and you’re still so fucking desireable to me. I don’t want you to do things to make me happy all the time; being with you is enough to raise my spirits, and we can compromise like any other healthy couple. It’s not all about one or the other. And trust me, I’m going to love you no matter what.” He propped his head on his hands, smiling bashfully at Keith. His cheeks were tinted pink and Keith had to physically restrain himself from reaching out to pinch them. “I’m so, so sorry about assuming what you were feeling. I should have talked to you, used basic communication, figured out your side of the story before acting rashly. I’d love to be your boyfriend again. I just want to make sure it’s what you want and not… something you’re forcing yourself into.”

“Of course I want this,” Keith said, surprised. “I’ve always wanted this. Lance, I’ve been in love with you for  _ years _ before we started dating. There’s no possible way I  _ couldn’t  _ want this. And I’m sorry for acting that way - I didn’t even realize I’d changed at all.” He fidgeted in the bed, lacing and unlacing his fingers together. “I’ll work on it. I swear I trust you. I don’t really mind doing all those things. I don’t think I even realized I was doing it. I think I just wanted to make you happy.” He blushed down at the sheets. “I love you a lot,” he mumbled.

“And I get that,” Lance said. “I always want you to be happy, too. But I don’t think you should change yourself to fit whatever you think my ideal model of a person is (which is just you, by the way). I love you for you, Keith. I didn’t get with you for some other person. I wanted mullet Keith. Cryptid hunter Keith. Calling me at three in the morning while having an existential crisis about whether the moon landing was faked or not Keith.” He laughed a little. “So go out with me again, Mr. Conspiracy Theorist?” 

“Gladly,” Keith said, beaming, so happy he didn’t even care about his bright red face and the tears rolling down his cheeks. He reached for Lance, grabbing his shoulders and yanking him onto the bed.

The kiss was the same as Keith had remembered from before, if not better. Lance’s lips were as soft as ever, pressing against Keith’s gently, and his hands traveled familiarly across Keith’s body, one going to run through his hair and the other resting against his hip, rubbing circles with his thumb. It caused butterflies in his stomach, slightly reminiscent of flowers but much more pleasant. It was like waking up in the morning after a nightmare and seeing the world still there, lit in golden sunlight out the window, not overrun by demons or monsters or zombies or werewolves. It was like reading your favorite book after forgetting about it, somehow new and familiar at the same time, just as good as it was before but with added details you must have forgotten, like Lance’s hair tickling Keith’s cheeks and the small, gentle sounds he made as their lips connected over and over again. It was so, so good, and this time Keith  _ knew  _ that they were going to make this work.

-

“Keith!” Lance yelled. His voice reverberated throughout the house, as loud as if he was standing right next to Keith even though he was outside on the front porch. “Kosmo’s ruining our flower begs again! Your seaside daisies are getting demolished!”

“Stop him then!” Keith shouted back. 

“How?” Lance demanded. “I can’t exactly stick him in time-out or something. He teleports, remember?”

Keith stomped out of the kitchen, trying to act annoyed, but the huge smile upon his face probably gave him away as the massive sap he was. “I’m trying to pack for our trip to Virginia,” he told Lance. 

“I still don’t understand why I have to come on that,” Lance objected. “Couldn’t you and Pidge go? Camping is fine and all but I need my skin care routine, Keith. Do you want to have an oily, pimpled mess of a boyfriend? I think not.”

“No,” Keith said, laughing as Lance made a mock-disappointed face. “I need my good luck charm, remember?” He gestured to the large wolf digging up flowers in their garden, blue stripes shimmering in the air. He wondered briefly whether one of Lance’s nieces had poured glitter into his fur. “How else do you think we found Kosmo? I need your help to prove mothman’s existence.”

Lance laughed and wrapped an arm around Keith, shaking his head as he grinned down at their pet. “Don’t leave me for your cryptid boyfriend,” he warned.

“Oh, no promises,” Keith teased. 

“Love you, baby,” Lance said. He pressed a quick kiss to the top of Keith’s head.

Keith grabbed Lance’s face as he drew away, bringing him back into the embrace for another kiss, and another, until they were all but making out on their front porch. Finally, they separated, still pressed together, smiling softly at each other. “Love you, too,” Keith promised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for waiting so long for me to get this up! <3 Sorry if it seems like my style changed a lot during this; I wrote the first part last November, and the last 3k last night. Also, sorry if my depiction of Klance is unrealistic; I've actually never really had a serious relationship, so I don't have a lot of experience. I kind of just went off what I've heard and read, so if it seems a little awkward, that's why. 
> 
> Let me know if there are any warnings or grammar things I need to change. Happy reading! <3

**Author's Note:**

> Just a disclaimer, everyone might seem a little OOC because I actually haven’t watched all of Voltron. I mostly got into the fandom because there are a lot of really good fics and authors. So I’ve watched a few episodes but I’m more familiar with the fandom version than canon so. Please let me know if anything seems super out of character and I’ll try to change it lol. 
> 
> I’ve seen a lot of Hanahaki fics in this fandom, but mostly before the two characters get together. I thought it would be more fun to write one after they’ve broken up, so. Here you go lol.
> 
> Please let me know if there are any typos or anything I should change. I probably missed something. Also, any feedback would be very appreciated. :) <3


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